Chinese Foot Binding

While most of God’s creatures seem content with straightforward cock-to-cunt copulation and the occasional rubbing of genitals on a pant leg, human beings seem to have an unending supply of perverse inventiveness when it comes to getting hard and getting off. Not least among these is the ancient Chinese practice of foot binding.

Just as firm, full tits are splashed liberally across the pages of modern American porn magazines, so too did deformed, four inch feet once fill the pages and canvases of Ancient Chinese Erotica. Countless paintings, engravings, and poems depict horny Chinese men fondling or otherwise admiring the tiny, slippered feet of demure Chinese beauties. If it seems hard to understand why anyone would get really hot over feet, especially over freakishly small feet, consider what grotesqueries lie within those tiny, embroidered slippers!

First, the whole ugly process of foot binding began when a girl was about 4 years old. A long cloth was tightly bound around each of her feet, causing her four smaller toes to bend completely under. Then, every day, the binding would be pulled tighter and tighter, until - after two or three years -- the little girl’s foot was essentially broken in half and bent double.

Sometimes a rock or large block of stone would be used to break the bones that inhibited progress. Other times the child would simply be forced to walk back and forth on her bound and bent feet, so that her own weight would help crush the foot into the desired shape. The pain was excruciating and endless. At times it was so intense that the child would black out. Often the mother (to whom it fell to enact the time-honored tradition), would gag the child to muffle her screams. Each day she would clean blood and pus from the child's wounds. Frequently bits of dead gangrenous flesh would fall off. Often whole toes would come loose. And all the while, the stench was beyond belief.

But when the process was finally "complete", the result was essentially a pair of castrated feet about three to four inches long. The resulting dainties required the girl or woman to lead the life of the quiet homebody, depending on her husband to handle all matters outside the home–- a situation remarkably in keeping with the ancient Confucian teachings about the proper relations between men and women. In fact, Confucian values such as chastity, obedience, and loyalty were assured by the little bound feet possessed by vast numbers of Chinese wives and daughters.

While this fact in itself may have appealed to Chinese males of yesteryear, what probably really turned them on was the belief that tottering around (on the balls of her heels) significantly tightened and strengthened a Chinese woman’s buttocks and inner thighs and turned her vagina into one tight hotsy totsy love machine – all the better to grip your “jade spear” with my dear.

Whether this claim holds any truth or not, it is thoroughly documented that women with bound feet suffered greatly from the condition all through their lives. While foot binding was finally outlawed in 1911, it was not until the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1940s and '50s that it was genuinely obliterated. Sadly, women with bound feet were often targeted for humiliation and brutality as China moved from a pro-aristocrat to a pro-worker ethos. Many such women took to wearing larger shoes, stuffed with straw or newspaper, to hide the condition of their feet.

Considering that foot binding had its earliest beginnings some 800 to 1,000 years ago in the T’ang Dynasty, becoming widespread between 1368-1644, it is astonishing that a practice so obviously cruel could continue for so long -- especially considering that it made its victims less able to contribute economically. But it simply goes to show what creatures of the mind human beings are. For the ancient Chinese, a woman’s tolerance of foot binding demonstrated her obedience to her parents and to her future husband and his family (a value which Confucians believed built a stronger, healthier society). It also showed the individual's own mastery over the self-oriented impulses of pleasure and pain. (Or, in the mother's case, over the natural instinct of responding to her child's pleas and screams. Rationally, she knew that her daughter would hate her later on when she could not marry.)

Like the “gom jabbar” in the science fiction classic Dune, being unmoved by pain, choosing social ideals over personal impulses, proved the Chinese woman to be a spiritually strong, “civilized” human being. It is ironic then, that with the arrival of white westerners in the late 19th century, the Chinese began to look at themselves through new eyes and to see the practice of foot binding as barbaric, uncivilized, and as weakening to Chinese society.